Ten days in Bali: the sarong I never took off, a volcano at two in the morning, and the sea at Kuta

Tom wanted a volcano. I wanted ten days where nobody needed anything from me before eight in the morning. We compromised, which is how I came to be standing on the side of Mount Batur at five, in a borrowed fleece, holding a plastic cup of coffee so sweet it made my teeth hurt. But that was day four. Let me start where Bali started for me, which was the pavement.

The offerings

Every morning in Ubud there are small square baskets of palm leaf on the steps, the pavements, the dashboard of the taxi, the top of the ATM: a few flowers, a cracker, a pinch of rice, a stick of incense still going. They are put out at dawn, by women mostly, and by nine the ants and the scooters have had them. I stepped on one on our first morning and apologised to it out loud. Tom still brings this up. By the third day I was walking around them without looking, the way the locals do, and I think that was the point at which the place let me in.

Our cottage was ten minutes from the main road, down a lane that was mostly chickens. There was a gecko in the bathroom the size of my hand. Tom named it. I made my peace with it on the condition it stayed on its side of the mirror, which it mostly honoured. The nights are loud in Ubud, not with traffic but with frogs and that one bird that sounds like a car alarm, and I slept better than I have in years.

Market, monkeys, waterfall

The cooking class started in the market at half past seven, when it is still mostly women with baskets on their heads and nobody is selling sarongs yet. Our teacher walked us through galangal, turmeric root the colour of a safety vest, tiny red shallots, the little green limes, and then back to her family compound to pound it all into base genep, the spice paste under nearly everything Balinese. My arm gave up before the paste did. I bought a sarong on the way out, dark blue with a thin gold line, because the market woman told me I would need it for the temples and because it was beautiful. I wore it every day for the rest of the trip. It is on the back of my chair as I write this.

The Monkey Forest is a real forest, which I had not understood. Banyan roots across the paths, moss on three temples, a river in a gorge, and the long-tailed macaques everywhere, not as a show but as the people who live there. The rules at the gate say no food, no loose sunglasses, nothing dangling. I carried my bag against my chest like a woman at a bus stop at midnight. Tom took his sunglasses off and tucked them into his shirt, and a macaque sat on his shoulder for a full minute anyway, looking at him the way you look at a vending machine. We finished at Tegenungan waterfall late in the afternoon, when the light goes gold and the people who came by coach have gone back up the steps, and I stood in the spray until my dress stuck to me.

The next evening was the Kecak at Pura Dalem. Nothing had prepared me for the sound. A hundred men in a circle, bare-chested, checked cloth round their waists, no instruments at all, just the chant, chak-chak-chak, rising and dropping for an hour while the Ramayana plays out in the middle by firelight: the monkey general in white fur, the demon king, the fire at the end that a dancer kicks through barefoot. I felt it in my sternum. Tom's phone died in the first ten minutes and he just watched, which I think was the best thing that happened to him all week.

The volcano, and the water

Two in the morning. The jeep had no doors. The road climbed through villages where dogs barked us past, and at the top it was cold, properly cold, which nobody tells you about Bali, and I was glad of the fleece the guide produced from a crate. The sun came up over the caldera and Lake Batur, the mist lifting off the water in strips, and a monkey took a banana out of Tom's hand while he was taking a photograph of it. Four hours, back for breakfast, Tom unbearable with happiness.

Tirta Empul, that afternoon, is the thing I would send anyone to. It is a working temple with spring-fed pools, and visitors can join the purification ritual: a sarong and a sash, into the cold water, then from spout to spout along the wall, head under each one. The family next to me had a baby in a sling, the grandmother holding her under the water for a second and both of them laughing. I had not planned to cry at a temple. I did, a little, and nobody minded. We finished at the Tegallalang rice terraces, which have grown a fringe of swings and 'I love Bali' signs along the top road; walk down past them and the farmers are still working the terraces exactly as the postcard promised.

Down to the sea

The bus to Kuta takes a couple of hours and you feel the island change on the way: the terraces flatten out, the traffic thickens, the air starts to taste of salt. Kuta is loud. It has bracelet sellers who know your name after one afternoon and surf schools with boards stacked like crayons. It also has a beach so long and wide that you can walk for an hour and still not reach the end of the sunset, and that is why we came. We spent one quiet afternoon at Dharmayana temple, red lanterns and incense and not another tourist, and a sober hour at the Bombing Memorial, reading the names, which we were glad we did not skip.

Tom had his day at Waterbom and came back sunburnt and twelve years old. I had my day on the sand with a book I did not read. We drove up to Lovina on the north coast, black volcanic sand that gets hot by nine, and the slow old-Bali feel that Kuta lost a long time ago. And on the last evening, Uluwatu: the temple on the cliff, the Indian Ocean a hundred metres below, the Kecak again at sunset with the sky doing its orange, then pink, then violet. A monkey took Tom's sunglasses off his face. A man in a temple sash traded them back for a banana in under a minute, with the air of someone who does this forty times a day. He does.

What I know now

Inland first, coast second, so the quiet comes before the noise. Buy the sarong on the first day. Take the fleece. Say yes to the water at Tirta Empul even if you are not a temple person; I am not, and it is the thing I think about most. And let the man with the banana handle the monkey.